01 May 2016

“Hunnisch-Türkische Beziehungen” — A. von Gabain

Here is a paper originally published more than sixty years ago in German on Huns and Turks by the prominent German Turkologist and Sinologist Annemarie von Gabain (1901—1993), with an attempt to translate it into English. There is abundant and clear evidence, some more than circumstantial, that the Turks are descendants of the Huns. Endnotes and entries in square brackets are added.“Hunnisch-Türkische Beziehungen,” Zeki Velidi Togan’a
Armağan, TTK, Ankara, 2010.

In the last century, we had
the Huns, or as the Chinese call them the Hsiung-nu,
equated sometimes with the Mongols, sometimes with the Turks; some identified
them even with the Finns, and finally with the Slavs! Also, there was no
unified opinion about how the Hsiung-nu
of Chinese were related to the Huns in Europe.

Since the beginning of our
century, more accurate research about the origins of the Turks have been provided
to us. Scholars such as F. Hirth, E. Chavannes, J. J. M. De Groot, O. Franke,
P. Pelliot and others have tapped new data from the original Chinese histories,
and from Chinese and Japanese commentators.

Furthermore, we now know, through
the work of B. Karlgren, the approximate pronunciation of the Chinese around
the time of 600 A.D., which allows us to reconstruct the old, traditional
foreign words in Chinese characters, and hence the former names of people with
greater confidence. Due to this recent research, it seems appropriate once
again to put together what is reported about the Turks in terms of the Huns by
the Chinese historians.

If we refrain from short
inscriptions, as they are found on bone or bronze, the oldest Chinese
historical source is the collective work Shu-king
[Shijing–Book of Odes],
whose earliest parts date back to three thousand years ago.

The Chinese sources call them
first Hun-chu or Hun-chou, the old pronunciation after B. Kalgren (Analytic Dictionary, Paris 1923) ḥiuên-tiuk; later, they write it as Hien-yün < ḥiām-iüén or Hün Yü
< ḥiuen-iuk, and finally since the 3rd century B.C. as Hsiung nu < ḥiwong nuo.

{Due to printing
difficulties, the reconstructed forms must be simplified.}

The ancient comments unanimously
agree that all of these names refer to the same people. The pronunciation,
which has been given in various approximation, may have originally been roughly
*Huntuk or *Hunna, so our “Hun” comes very close.

The mighty Empire of the Huns
was, in pre-Christian times, a nomadic state, its borders, therefore, being in so
much flux. Its heartland was today’s Inner and Outer Mongolia. The situation in
China was particularly critical during the Han
dynasty (206 B.C.–221 A.D.), when it was the main issue for every ruler to maintain
a tolerable relationship with these northern neighbors. Some emperors decided
to fight, others to establish friendship pacts, others again were forced to
regular donations that were almost a tribute.

In the 4th and 5th centuries
A.D., China was split into two halves. The South, with its capital in the area
of today’s Nan-king, was dominated by short-lived Chinese dynasties. In the
North, successive rulers followed one another, also at short intervals, which
were sometimes Chinese sometimes foreign, and none of which came to power over
the entire North, but slaughtered each other in battles. The northern kingdoms
were called the “Sixteen Kingdoms”; they were founded by Chinese, Hsiung nu, Xianbei, and Tibetans.

Four of these sixteen States
were created by the Hsiung-nu, if not
settled by them alone. This was initially the Hànzhào Kingdom [Hànzhào–Former
Zhao], which, in 319–329, consisted
of the territory of today’s Shanxi province.
The royal family considered itself as a descendant of Mao-tun, the great Hsiung-nu
Emperor in the 2nd century B.C.

This Kingdom was destroyed by
its eastern neighbors, the equally Hunnic Empire Hòuzhào (319–352) [Hòuzhào–Later
Zhao]. At its court, a rich culture flourished. They had become sedentary
only recently, already accustomed to the architecture and Confucian ceremonies,
and even introduced Buddhism via Central Asia.

After the end of this empire,
it would take fifty years until the Hsiung-nu
were capable of establishing a new government. Once, when the people of the Hsiung-nu was still a unified empire in
Mongolia, it fell victim to a disaster; subsequently, in 54 B.C., a part of the
people submitted to China.

They were located in the
present province of Shanxi. These Huns
belonged to the Helien family who had
distinguished themselves as a glorious family among the Huns. At the end of the
4th century, a member of this family named Bobo
[Helian Bobo][1]
was at the court of Hòuqín [Later
Qin] with a big reputation.

This Hòuqín, one of the Sixteen Kingdoms, was a Tibetan establishment in
the present-day province of Shanxi.
In the year 407, Helian Bobo is said
to get rid of his former patron, and founded his own state in the territory of
today’s Shanxi province, which he
called Xia [Xia].

He settled with the Shan-yü title, and called himself
eventually “the Emperor of Xia,”
thereby making claims on the universal Chinese rule. East of this state was the
mighty Běi Wèi Empire [Běi Wèi–Northern Wei] or T’o-pa as an eternal danger. It is
interesting to hear what this state won in 426 for a booty in an unfortunate
campaign for the Huns: immense herds of cattle. The social organization was,
therefore, still semi-nomadic.

The fourth Hunnish state
under the Sixteen Kingdoms had a similarly short life as the state of Xia: In 401, in the eastern part of the
present province of Gansu, a Hun, named
Méngxùn [Jǔqú
Méngxùn], from the house of Jǔqúfounded the Bĕi
Liáng [Northern Liang]
kingdom. This state at the outpost of the Tarim countries received levies on
transit goods and won considerable political standing.

Méngxùn was
a skilled politician; he set apart the Chinese in central China and other
foreign powers in the North, especially since the Běi Wèi approached to plot. Despite his military efficiency, he was
an avid Buddhist. With the death of Méngxùn,
the state lost its greatest power; his successor was more of a scholar than a
warrior. In 439, when the powerful Běi
Wèi moved against this state, the king surrendered without much resistance.

This was, however, not the
sentiments of his people: a large portion of the Huns withdrew under the king’s
brother in 442 to the West. In the area of Shànshàn
[Uyghur: Pichan Nahiyisi]and
Turfan, a Hunnish Empire formed again that could sustain itself until 460.
Then, this disappeared, too. The rest of this part of the population must have
migrated further to West, perhaps even as far as Volga.

The ephemeral state
formations of the Sixteen Kingdoms in the North were finally replaced by an
equally foreign power, the aforementioned state of Běi Wèi, since 436 the sole power in the North, deep into the Tarim
Basin in the West.

In the middle of the 6th
century [535], this empire disintegrated into an Eastern and a Western half.
While the East was Chinese, the West was under a Hun called Yǔwén Tài [Yǔwén Tài]. In 557, the former Wei emperor ceded
his throne to this Hun family; the Yǔwén called his state Bĕi
Zhōu [Bĕi Zhōu–Northern
Zhou]. This Hunnish state lived in a rather strained relationship with the
people of the T’u-chüe.

However, the king had the
daughter of Mu-han, the king of T’u-chüe, as his wife; and they had
entered into an arms alliance with these people; but in 563, when the Huns
wanted to dispose of their pesky rivals in the East, the government of Běi Qí [Běi Qí–Northern Qi], the T’u-chüe left them ignominiously in the
lurch, and the Hunnic Zhōu were
severely defeated.

The mass-murderous wars and
raids of the last centuries seem also to have finally exhausted the power of
the warlike Huns. The Chinese father-in-law of the Bĕi Zhōu king, named Yang Jian
[Yang Jian],
ripped, in 581, the power and the imperial throne of Zhōu; and hence, the last major state of the Huns in East Asia was
destroyed.

The importance and the danger
of the Huns for the Chinese had gone out. However, they continued to live in
the memory of the Chinese, and especially amongst the racially mixed northern
Chinese people today, because there had been countless weddings between the
local people and invaders in the turbulent times of the 4th through 6th
centuries.

Since when did the Chinese
know the Turks, or, if we pose the question in a narrower sense: since when did
they mention the name “Türk”? The Dutch sinologist J. J. M. de Groot drew our
attention to the already-mentioned people in ancient times, Ti < d’iek, and wanted to see the first description of “Türk” in this
word.

This hypothesis is
unprovable. The Chinese gave general descriptions for all foreign nations,
grouped according to the cardinal directions. So, they called all foreigners in
the South Man, in the West Kiang; the peoples of the North were,
quite in general, referred to as Jung
or as Ti.[2]

It is impossible to find characteristics
of the Ti matching exclusively with
the Turks that would prove this hypothesis, because the Ti were just not a single people, but all the unknown people who
lived there in the North, and undertook, on occasion, unwanted incursions into
the Empire.

Only the Sui Annals, which are composed of material from the period around
600 A.D., provide thorough information about this people. According to them,
the T’u-chüe or Turks were the blacksmiths
of the Jou-juan, to whom they had
recently been subjected, and who lived in the Kin-shan, the “Golden Mountains” [Jinshan – Altai Mountains].

Probably, this is the
Mongolian Altai. In the same source, it is claimed the people of Türk have
settled on a helmet-shaped mountain. First, one has the form of the mountain,
then the people is called “Türk.”
This is understandable, because, in old Turkish, türk means “power, young, and strong.”

At any rate, this people was
subordinate to the A-shi-na royal house,
which, after the collapse of the aforementioned Hunnish state Bĕi Liáng in 439 A.D., had departed from
today’s Gansu province with five
hundred families ahead of the armies of the Běi
Wèi state.

It is, therefore, nice to keep
in mind that the name “Turk” called by Chinese in the early Middle Ages is not
the large family of nations that we today call and find amongst other peoples
scattered from Poland in the West to Yakutia in the Far East, but only a
special strain of it, a tribe which was so famous and powerful later on that
its name was to be attached to its cousins, too.

This fact makes the research
difficult. For us, it is not important whether the Hsiung-nu were the ancestors of just this tribe, but how they have
stood with respect to a large family of nations, be they Uighurs, Seljuks,
Kirghiz or others.

However, perhaps more people
have been Turkic than we assume today; on the contrary, perhaps some people are
only linguistically Turkicized. To be completely safe in our investigations, we
want to deal especially with the T’u-chüe
and to do so with the Uighurs, whose language is sufficiently well known to us as
Turkic.

The Wei Annals, a work of the 6th century, wrote in 545: “the T’u-chüe is a special unit of the Hsiung-nu called A-shi-na.” This information is not correct, because the A-shi-na were, as mentioned, only the royal
family. The author of this work, Wei Shou,
lived at the time of the last Hun Empire, the Bĕi Zhōu; he had to have good knowledge about the ethnicity
relation. Unfortunately, however, the Wèi
Shū have been revised several times, most recently even in the 11th
century; therefore, we are never sure whether this note is merely a later
addition.

The Uighurs are also said to
be the descendants of the Huns. This information comes from the two Tángshū (Jiù Tángshu, chapter 195, and Xīn Tángshū, chapter 217), works that have been edited mainly
in the 10th century but based on much older sources.

The aforementioned text
points out, moreover, that the Uighurs pastured by the Selenga River and were
called Tiĕlè, i.e., Tölis, in the Běi Wèi period in the 6th century, and they used high carts. The “high
cart” is kao-ch'e in Chinese. Indeed,
the Tölis are now called Kao-ch'e.

In Chapter 217 of the Tángshū, one of the fifteen tribes of
the Uighurs is called Hun < g’uên. Is this supposed to be the former
name Hsiung-nu and does this people specifically
carry the tradition of that formerly glorious people? Incidentally, it should
be mentioned that, based on the same source, the Uighurs had another name Wu-hu < uo-guo; according to a hypothesis that was already accepted by V.
Thomsen, that would not be a rewriting of uigur
but oguz.

In addition to the
historically credible traditions about their ancestry, there are legendary ones,
too, that may be mentioned at least. The Wei
Annals report about the T’u-chüe king
A-shi-na as follows: the Turks were
completely beaten by a neighbouring people, and killed up to a single child.
This boy’s feet were cut off, and his wound was exposed in the wilderness.

There, she found a deep cave,
where, surrounded by high mountains, there was a huge fertile meadow. In this
magical cave, the she-wolf gave birth to ten boys. One was called A-shi-na. These young people used to
bring their women from the outside world. Only after a few generations, they
left the cave as an entire nation, and went under the rule of the Jou-Juan.

Even the Wei-shu doubts this descent and reports another legend. According
to this, the T’u-chüe came from the So kingdom, which had been North of the
Hun Empire. In this account, too, a she-wolf is referred to as the mother of A-shi-na. Matriarchy should have
prevailed in this people.

Also, a prince of Wusun, who had been expelled in 174 B.C.
with his people from the Yüe-chi to
the Hsiung-nu, was said to have been
suckled by a she-wolf. And finally, the Mongols are also descended, according
to the Yuan-ch’ao pi-shi [The Secret
History of the Mongols], from a gray wolf and a white doe.

The Empire from which the
ancestors of the T’u-chüe in 439 might
have migrated was under Hunnish rule, namely under the previously mentioned Bĕi Liáng state to the East of today’s
province of Gansu. One cannot,
however, determine if only the government or how much of the upper class of
this country and indeed of its population were actually Hunnish.

Moreover, the eastern neighbor
of Bĕi Liáng, the Xia state, was ruled, as mentioned, by a
Hun family, namely by the Helian. The
royal family of the T’u-chüe, the A-shi-na, is referred to as Xia, albeit only in the T’ung-chi, a work of the 11th century,
but considered to be very trustworthy.

In contrast to the country’s
name Bĕi Liáng, the name Xia in the 5th and 6th centuries seems
to have signified more or less a national concept, because there is frequently
the talk of the “language of the Xia.”

Wearing braided plait of hair
was not a Chinese custom until the Manchu have imposed this hairstyle on the
Chinese in the 17th century—a custom which was again suppressed with violence
after the collapse of this foreign dynasty, since it appeared to the Chinese,
with their resurgent national sentiment, as something foreign and hence
shameful.

While braided hair was not
Chinese, it was customary among the Turks: the Chinese pilgrim Xuánzàng [Xuanzang] who went through the
territory of the Western Turks reported in 630 at Talas that even though the
king allowed his hair to openly flow, all the other Turks wore their hair in fake
braids.

Other characteristic
similarities between the Huns and Turks are as follows: in 553, Wei-shu says with disapproval that the
Turks have no respect for the old—one of the basic moral precepts in China—but,
like the Huns, appreciate the strength of youth.

Shi-chi, the
basic historical work of China written at the beginning of the 1st century B.C.,
says about the cult of Hsiung-nu
(Chapter 110): in the 5th month of each year, the Huns offer sacrifice to the
ancestors, the sky, the Earth and the spirits. We know through Göktürk inscriptions
in Mongolia that the Turks also worshipped ancestors, the heavens and the
Earth.

The Turks are thus referred
to by some Chinese historians as descendants of the Hsiung-nu. They migrated from an area that was ruled by Hsiung-nu, and that, apart from the
Chinese, Xianbei and Tibetans, was
also inhabited by Hsiung-nu. Some of
their customs are the same as that of the Hsiung-nu.
Among the circumstantial evidence for the identification of the Hsiung-nu with the Turks, there are
those of linguistic nature, one of which, the Xia, i.e., the Hunnic word fu-li
= Turkic börü, was already mentioned.

The greatest Hsiung-nu emperor known to us was Mao-tun < mâg-tuên who died in 174 B.C. F. Hirth has shown convincingly that
this is a transcription of bagatur, a
word that is abundantly documented in old Turkish as a “hero.”

De Groot refers to a word ou-t’o < êu-t’uât, mentioned in the Shi-chi.
It should be a border area between the Hsiung-nu
and the Dōnghú [Donghu]; therefore, de
Groot took the precise meaning of “military zone,” and identified it with the
old Turkish ordu “camp, army.” By the
way, it lives on in the German “Hords.”

In the Qian Han shu [Ch’ien Han shu—History of the Former Han Dynasty],
the continuation of the Shi-chi,
which was edited in the 1st century A.D., the title of the Hsiung-nu emperor, the Shan-yü,
was given (Chapter 94) as ch’êng-li ku-t’u
< t’ang-lji and kuo-d’uo. They contain two well-known words
in Turkish: tängri and qut “heavenly majesty.”

The form tängri, besides the Old Turkic, is still found in many other Turkic
dialects, and in Mongolian it is a loanword; qut in old Turkic means “majesty, dignity, blessings, good fortune,”
as well as “spirit.” This title for a Shan-yü
would have been linguistically and conceptually perfectly understandable even
for an Uighur; it is worth recalling one of the Uyghur royal title: kün ay tängridän qut bulmĭș “who has received
the majesty from Sun and Moon God.”

The word tu < d’uok, already in
the Êrh-ya [Erya] in the Chou period in the first millenium B.C., means “flag with yak tail
or pheasant feather.” The orthography of the Chinese character points to a
foreign word; if one wants to assume that here is a Hunnic word, then it could
be identified with the Old Turkic tug
“flag.”

In the Wei-shu (Chapter 95), the ancestor of the ruling family of Xia is called the Helian, T’ieh-fu or T’ieh-fa < t’iet-puêt or –b’iwat. He
was the son of a Hu and a Xianbei, so the house was bilingual.

P. Boodberg, in his essay
“The language of the T’o-pa Wei” (Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies1,
no. 2, 1936, pp. 167–185), therefore (p. 170), believed this character to be a
description of the Old Turkic tilmäçi
“interpreter.”

One has to take into account
the mindset of the Chinese people. The fear of the once powerful nation of
the Hsiung-nu, which had always
appeared ever again even after a long absence at the gates of China, survived
arguably well for centuries. When they finally actually and permanently stayed
away, and a people with the name Türk took over the role of the old imperial
enemy in the same region, is it not obvious that this was considered by the
Chinese as the old nemesis under a new name?

A similar source of error may
underlie the Turkish tradition. Of course, they kept themselves the glorious
tradition of their predecessors on the same ground. An evidence for this is perhaps
the use of the Hunnish Emperor’s name Bagatur in Old Turkic as a name meaning “hero,
brave.”

Another fact testifies to the
existence of such a tradition at the T’u-chüe:
As Bumin, the Turkish Kagan, transcribed in Chinese as T’u-men, beat Juan-Juan in 552 and
became independent, he took the title of i-li
k’o han that should mean the same as the Hunnic shan-yü.

In these Chinese characters,
we readily recognize the good Turkic il-kagan
‘Empire King’ or ilig-kagan ‘King and
Lord’ (strictly speaking, the latter is a synonym composition). About shan-yü say the Chinese texts that it
means “big and wide.”

As a Turkic word, no one has
been able to explain it so far in either of these pronunciations. This is not important
to our question. Essentially, however, the choice of the title by Bumin reveals
that this unifier of the Türk people felt as continuing the Hsiung-nu, but that he spoke a different
language. Since, obviously, the bearer of the title il-kagan should exercise the function of the former Shan-yü, the title was translated into
Turkish with national self-consciousness.

The title of the Hunnish
empress was Yen-chi; however, Bumin calls his main wife Ko-ho tun, which must
represent kagatun, a stretching form
of the Old Turkic katun ‘princess, lady,
wife.’ So, this is a second Turkish word that differs from the corresponding
Hunnish word.

Besides the Wusun and the people of the Loulan, Mao-tun also subdued Hu-kie
< huo-kiat. These should be the
same people as the Hu-ku < g’uk-kuet of the Wei shu, namely one of the tribes of the Kao-ch'e. It is considered to be the earliest mention of the name Uyghur. Later, around 50 B.C., the
submission of Wu kie < .uo-k’at by the Hsiung-nu is reported, a form of the name that seems to also
reproduce Uighur. Even after this, the
Uyghur were somewhat different from
the Hsiung-nu.

After what has been said so far, an equation of Hsiung-nu and Turks cannot be proven based
on all of the rather vague information. The Mongolian words detected in the
language of the Hsiung-nu are not
listed here, because they do not directly relate to the topic.

They bring no greater reliability
than the Turkic propositions. Unfortunately, all of this material are too
scanty to draw solid conclusions. However, we can talk about the already-mentioned
Tabgaç = T’o-pa or Běi Wèi—the
dynasty about which we are now relatively well-informed by some recent work.

W. Eberhard, incomparably
erudite in Chinese literature, listed in his book The Culture and Settlement of the Border Peoples of China (T’oung-pao36, supplemental volume, Leiden, 1942, p. 51) the different
traditions about the origin of the T’o-pa;
sometimes, it was claimed that they origi­nated from the Hsiung-nu, sometimes from the Xianbei,
or Chinese and Hsiung-nu or even from
the Mongols.

In spite of this typical
uncertainty, they are basically in the scope of our study. The Běi Wèi dynasty emerges after the collapse
of the last Hsiung-nu state, and it disappears
before the first occurrence of T’u-chüe.

In a more recent work, The T’o-pa Dynasty of Northern China, a
Sociological Study (Leiden, 1950) Eberhard has compiled all the tribal
names of this confederation. Based on this preliminary sinological work and the
aforementioned article by Boodberg, in which 32 T’o-pa words were identified, L. Bazin now examines in his Rescherches sur les parlers T’o-pa (T’oung-pao 39, Lei­den 1950 p. 228–329) 160 names and words in the T’o-pa language.

However, in the Chinese text,
which is the basis of this work, in addition to the pronuncia­tion, a meaning is
also given for only a few words, which makes identification somewhat
problematic. Moreover, the ambiguity of the Chinese transliterations of foreign
expressions is, unfortunately, only too well known.

This is a limitation that one
must take into account and also bear in mind. The obvious assumption, from which
Bazin proceeds, that the dialects spoken in the T’o-pa Empire were related to the later Turkic and Mongolian
dialects, is not daring, because some words, even in their Chinese
transcription, thrust themselves to this presumption, and the historical circumstances
make it very likely.

However, we need to keep this
starting point in mind, because it may have led to Turkic or Mongolian
reconstructions, where a similar word from a lesser-known dialect—such as from
a Tungusic language—existed in reality.

Bazin’s work is, therefore,
very appealing. Just as in the previously known Hsiung-nu words, Bazin also finds in this very abundant material
proto-Turkic, proto-Mongolian and also a few other foreign, perhaps Tungusic
elements.

Bazin concludes that, in the T’o-pa Empire, different languages or
dialects were spoken. When he detected a proto-Turkic word in a tribal name, he
believed that that tribe spoke a proto-Turkic dialect, and similarly he
concludes with proto-Mongolian or unexplained names.

According to the number of proto-Turkic
or proto-Mongolian reconstructions, which he finds reasonably surely in localizable
tribes, he says (p. 325) that in the North there are as many tribes with proto-Mongolian
dialects as proto-Turkic dialects, in the East only proto-Mongolian tribes, namely
three, in the South proto-Turkic (seven) tribes as well as one proto-Mongolian,
in the West of the Empire, proto-Turkic (eleven) as well as proto-Mongolian
(three) tribes; however, the wandering life of these tribes carries an
uncertainty into the calculation, because their national existence was not very
stable.

These ratios are not
unlikely; it is, indeed, believed in later times that the home of the Mongols lay
in the Northeast. However, the adoption of separate proto-Turkic and
proto-Mongolian dialects in the 5th century on the basis of this material is
not supported. One can interpret Bazin’s identifications differently.

As an example, the language
of the Treaty of Verdun in 843 A.D. can be recalled: this is by no means Latin nor
Vulgar Latin, because already some typical French forms appear in it; however,
this language is not yet French, either, but it shows its state, as it evolved
out of that.

The situation is similar for the
time of the T’o-pa Empire. It is,
indeed, striking that there is no Chinese text yet in which exclusively
proto-Turkic or only proto-Mongolian elements have been detected, but both
always seem to be present side by side. As for the peculiarities
that distinguish the proto-Turkic from the Old Turkic, Bazin observes very
astutely the following:

4. A change of -y and -n in the final position of some nouns. For -n, Bazin believed a neutral or collective meaning, as it is used
in a few Turkic nouns; -y, however, is
intended to express a singulative, as Bazin found next to the oğlan an oğlay etc, documented in Turkic. Should this not be a -y Mongolism, which is present, for
example, in the frequent exchange of -qu
and -quy?

5. Frequent failure of the final
-n. This phenomenon is quite common
in Mongolian. — What seems to be typical
of the proto-Turkic is so well-known Mongolism. One can, therefore, presume
that, at the time of the T’o-pa, proto-Turkic
and proto-Mongolian dialects were still not spoken, as the typical features had
not yet been developed in either of the languages. The proposed language
remnants cannot be linked to a certain community of the two language groups.

In summary, the following
interpretation of criticism of peers is to be presented now: some Hsiung-nu tribes were the common ancestors
of the Turks and the Mongols, each of whom had still more different ancestors.

The languages of the two
peoples have lost some elements of the common original language but preserved
some characteristics. Both have developed differently in different tribes,
which were geographically separated from each other, and especially during the internationally
harrowing times of Sixteen Kingdoms, new racial intermixtures have each added
new and different elements to each of the two groups.

Regarding the T’o-pa period, everything was still
evolving. In a forced retreat by adverse political conditions until a social order
is restored again, and thus perhaps developed in silence, in the “cave” of the
legend, the typical Turkic eventually came out, which is clearly distinguished
from Mongolian.

[1] In
391, he sent his son Liu Zhilidi (劉直力鞮 /conf. Chuvash Çăлтăр) to attack
Northern Wei’s prince Tuoba Gui, and Tuoba Gui not only defeated Liu Zhilidi,
but crossed the Yellow River to attack Liu Weichen’s capital Yueba (悅拔, in
modern Ordos, Inner Mongolia), capturing it and forcing Liu Weichen and Liu
Zhilidi to flee. — Wikipedia article
on Helian Bobo. Çăлтăр = Yıldız.

[2] The
ancient Chinese classed their neighbors by compass direction as the Siyi (四夷) “Four
Barbarians,” comprising the Beidi, Nanman, Dongyi and Xirong. The
four names, or combinations of them like ‘Yi-Di’ are often used to mean
“barbarians.” The Liji “Record of Rites” details ancient stereotypes about the
Siyi ”Four Barbarians” surrounding China. – Wikipedia
article on Beidi.